temporary file spawning

[Ade Fewings]

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Julian Field wrote:

> Ade Fewings wrote:
>
>> Following up with more details on my own email.........
>>
>>> We have two mail servers running on Solaris 9 Sparc.  Sendmail 8.12.10
>>> utilizing MailScanner 4.36.4 to call SpamAssassin 3.0.1.  Earlier
>>> today, one of our large mailing lists got hit a couple of times and
>>> the servers got a bit busy.  However, something went wrong and /tmp
>>> filled up with
>>> spamassassin.25755.Bdgxlb.tmp esque files.  Hundred of thousands were
>>> created in a short time, running /tmp out of i-nodes and thus
>>> effectively stopping MailScanner.
>>>
>>> Killing MailScanner, cleaning /tmp and restarting would then reproduce
>>> the problem again soon after.  I truss'd the output of a few of the
>>> MailScanner processes that were going bad and all they were doing was
>>> trying to open new files in /tmp.
>>
>>
>>
>> We have further discovered that this problem definitely only occurs when
>> MailScanner is set to use SpamAssassin.  Switch off SpamAssassin and
>> there are zero problems.  So, being relatively unknowledgable about
>> MailScanner, the question that comes up is what is creating these
>> temporary files?  It is either SpamAssassin itself or something in
>> MailScanner that gets switched on when you tell it to use SpamAssassin.
>>
>> Can anybody offer any guidance on whether MailScanner itself creates
>> these files?
>
>
> Advise you try increasing
> SpamAssassin Timeout
> in MailScanner.conf.
>
Thanks for this guidance, but it hasn't worked.  I quadrupled the
SpamAssassin timeout and got the same behaviour.  Additionally, I have
had the chance to see a bad MailScanner process in action when things
are going wrong.  The whole process of creating a couple of hundred
thousand takes less than twenty seconds and truss'ing the process itself
shows endless pages of the following sprawling past very quickly:

open64("/tmp/spamassassin.19296.zEQAlU.tmp",
O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = 256
close(256)                                      = 0
open64("/tmp/spamassassin.19296.6s0hxi.tmp",
O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = 256
close(256)                                      = 0
open64("/tmp/spamassassin.19296.4c61CQ.tmp",
O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = 256
close(256)                                      = 0
open64("/tmp/spamassassin.19296.uPHYoK.tmp",
O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = 256
close(256)                                      = 0
.....

I've tried upgrading MIME::Tools to 5.416 and SpamAssassin to 3.0.2 with
no success.  I am now rather clueless.

Thanks for your help
Ade

--
___________________________________________________
Ade Fewings MEng

School of Informatics, University of Wales, Bangor,
Dean Street, Bangor, Gwynedd. LL57 1UT. UK.

ade at informatics.bangor.ac.uk  www.informatics.bangor.ac.uk/~ade
Tel: +44 (0)1248 382736       Fax: +44 (0)1248 361429
___________________________________________________


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